The Death of Bunny Munro

Nick Cave

Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the scent of adventure to the lonely housewives of England’s south coast. Set adrift by his wife’s death he hits the road one last time—with his young son in tow.

As Bunny swaggers from door-to-door hawking his wares and feeding his libido, nine-year-old Bunny Junior waits in the car seeking the comfort of his mother’s ghost and watching his father self-destruct.

Haunted by his appetites, jealous husbands and a serial killer in a devil suit, Bunny Munro is a desperate man.

And he’s going to die.

Stylish, angry and engrossing, The Death of Bunny Munro is at once blackly comic, raw with heartache and bursting with Nick Cave’s hallmark wit and lyricism.

The lead singer of The Birthday Party, The Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Nick Cave has been performing music for more than 30 years. He has collaborated with Kylie Minogue, P. J. Harvey and many others. His album Murder Ballads has sold nearly a million copies. His debut novel, And the Ass Saw the Angel, was published in 1989 and has sold more than...

‘Put Cormac McCarthy, Franz Kafka and Benny Hill together in a Brighton seaside guesthouse and they might just come up with Bunny Munro. A compulsive read possessing all Nick Cave’s trademark horror and humanity, often thinly disguised in a galloping, playful romp.’

Irvine Welsh

‘There’s no more fevered imagination in contemporary song, and now Nick Cave is laying down the gauntlet to the literary world with a novel of sex, sin and mortality. Bunny Munro is our tragic ASBO-hero, whose ghost, past and present, won’t let him lay as he embarks on a libidinous rampage through the crumpled Sussex seaside. A lyrical end-of-the-pier morality tale, which, like your average Bad Seeds’ album, is a grotesque delight.’

GQ

‘At turns blackly comic and deeply penetrating, The Death of Bunny Munro is full of Cave’s signature horror and brilliant lyricism. There’s the same pulse you’ll find behind songs such as Nick the Stripper and Red Right Hand…This fast-paced book, laced with startling imagery and extravagant wordplay, is a compulsive read. It’s powerful stuff with the same repulsion quotient as Bret Easton Eliss’ American Psycho. It’ll leave you feeling muddied by the dark, sleazy world of Brighton guesthouses and the sexually twisted Bunny’s descent to hell.’

West Australian

‘A coherent and tightly structured page-turner…an often surprising as well as funny and spooky novel that is equal parts Flannery O’Connor grotesque and Stephen King horror story….By the end you begin to perceive that Bunny Munro is being set up as something of a modern-day Jesus, or at least a man marching along the path to his own twisted Cavalry. It’s something of a shock to realise then that this piece of pulp fiction is not just about sex or playing for misanthropic laughs or revelling in shock value. It’s really about fatherhood and love and a quest for male redemption in a desire-racked world.’

‘A triumph on many levels: staggering descriptive power, plot development that demands compulsive page-turning, the denial of an easy or predictable resolution. Perhaps Cave’s greatest triumph, though, is making the reader care about what could have been a thoroughly vile character. Bunny Munro may be damned by his own design but, thanks to Cave’s sympathetic portrait, the story of his downfall is more tragic than prurient.’

Montreal Gazette

‘The unabridged audiobook edition, read by the author with incidental music by
him and Warren Ellis, reveals the mad humour and wry genius of Cave’s
creation. One part Californication, one part Tales of Ordinary Madness, the poetry is
less beat than beat off…Great fun.’